Pete Townshend’s War

I first met Pete Townshend fifteen years ago in a modest London hotel suite. I was there with my friend Larry David Smith to interview Townshend for Smith’s book, “The Minstrel’s Dilemma.” We were already seated inside when I looked out the first-floor window and saw Townshend pulling into the parking lot.

He arrived alone, sans entourage or fanfare, driving himself in a gray Mercedes station wagon. Minutes later, the knob on the suite door rattled and shook. I stood, thinking that it might be a member of the hotel staff and wondering if I should turn the knob from our side. There was a pause, then more rattling, then the door swung open and Townshend burst through, eyes wide with exertion. He had apparently been trying to pull when he should have pushed.

We were scheduled to meet for two hours, but Townshend was unstoppable, regaling us not with stories of rock debauchery, but a stream of complex, sometimes half-formed ideas about popular culture, history, and human psychology. We were told not to ask him about his failing marriage; he immediately addressed it, confessing to a jolt of sadness while shaving that morning. “Don’t mention Keith Moon,” wrote his personal assistant via fax. “I never properly mourned for Keith,” he soon said, unprompted, and through tears.

After a long lunch and even longer afternoon, Townshend finally departed just before 8 P.M. to pick up his son. “If you have any burning questions,” he said on his way out the troublesome door, “call my office. I can be back in about an hour.” We didn’t call.

Much of what we talked about that day in 1997 was connected to the Second World War, Townshend’s father’s generation and his own, and the postwar trauma that he saw as the driving force behind rock music. His father, Cliff, had been a saxophonist in the Royal Squadronaires, an Air Force band employed to entertain British troops at home and abroad. I knew this, but didn’t know how much it meant to the guitarist and songwriter for the Who, who seemed to me beyond, above, and dismissive of all that.

“Trauma is passed from generation to generation,” he said, waving his arms emphatically, his crossed legs bouncing. “I’ve unwittingly inherited what my father experienced.”

In his new memoir, “Who I Am,” Townshend elaborates in a voice that is calm, frank, and willfully exacting, like someone carefully extracting clarity from the past’s haze. “So many children had lived through terrible trauma in the immediate postwar years in Britain,” he writes, “that it was quite common to come across deeply confused young people. Shame led to secrecy; secrecy led to alienation. For me these feelings coalesced in a conviction that the collateral damage done to all of us who had grown up amid the aftermath of war had to be confronted and expressed in all popular art—not just literature, poetry or Picasso’s Guernica. Music, too. All good art cannot help but confront denial on its way to the truth.”

In retrospect, Townshend’s violent and somewhat awkward hotel-suite entry seems entirely apt. His onstage persona epitomized frustration writ large, with an array of shadowboxing gestures to compensate for inadequacies, perceived or real. His windmill style of slashing at his guitar strings signaled a failure to pick them fluidly, even if it made him shed blood and fingernails in the process (and it did). His scissor kicks and crouching leaps into the air merely brought him back down again, stomping on invisible enemies, or, as Townshend himself would write in one of his songs, “pounding stages like a clown.” He jumped, bounced, shook and swayed from side to side, but he never really danced, nothing so sexy or elegant for the gangly, slightly stooped and narrow-eyed guitar player with the impossibly large nose.

For Townshend, music is physical. As a child he was awakened by the late-night swing jam sessions of his father and friends, whose beats and crescendos thrilled even as they stole sleep. His devotion to a career in music was sealed while he was watching his father perform on stage. As a pre-teen seated next to two female fans, he overheard one of them gushing over his father’s sexual desirability.

Townshend would eventually tower over rock music, which he helped to create, successful in no small part because he smashed his instrument in an act of “auto-destructive art,” a concept championed by his former teacher, Gustav Metzger. But for Townshend, the guitar was not trashed, it was remade, transformed. “I haven’t smashed it,” he recalls in his memoir of his first unwitting stage act, prompted by a potentially embarrassing physical gesture that broke the guitar’s neck. “I’ve sculpted it for them…. I stumbled upon something more powerful than words, far more emotive than my white-boy attempts to play the blues.”

Visually, the members of the Who formed a kind of collective sculpted destruction. Their movements were tight, jerky, and erratic. Drummer Keith Moon, the inspiration for the character Animal in the Muppets, rocked in his seat, distended his arms, mouth agape as if he wanted to eat his drums whole. Singer Roger Daltrey stomped around in circles like an imprisoned convict, swinging his microphone (taped to its cable like a hockey-stick blade), wanting to hit someone hard, though only hinting at it, because he couldn’t, not in this jail. Bassist John Entwistle stood still but looked and sounded loud and angry, stewing in his corner.

And Townshend was in a fight. In his so-called “windmill” move, he could well be swinging a machete or turning a helicopter prop on its side. He leapt and slid on his knees across the stage, not in ecstasy, but in anger. He banged his guitar against his head, hating and hurting himself in equal parts, implicating the audience. At times, he strummed staccato hard and aimed his guitar at the audience, mowing them down with an aural machine gun.

It was never friendly or pretty. There were many rock stars singing about war, and the British experience of it in particular (Roger Waters and Pink Floyd adhered to this theme). But no one but Townshend and his band seemed in songs and onstage to be reenacting war, in all its rage, pathos, stupidity, and barbarism. “I was a yobbo [hooligan],” Townshend repeats throughout his book, “who desired respect and affirmation.”

I discovered Townshend’s music as a teen-ager. I soon realized that most of the rock music I’d liked before I heard him paled next to what he was producing. His music was demanding, you either listened to it or passed, because the music was played angrily, loudly, and menacingly, and then switched into passages of plaintive loneliness and humiliation. Several girls I was trying to woo hated it. Who wants to rock out and be humiliated?

If Led Zeppelin made you want to boogie, and the Rolling Stones and the Doors made you want sex, Townshend and the Who made you want to smash something up, maybe even yourself, and survive the assault. I didn’t understand the power of Townshend’s songs then, but now that I have known and spoken with him for several years, the map is clearer. Townshend was writing about the fallout from two world wars, and I’ve only experienced “war” as an abstraction. What would it mean, like Townsend in post-war England, to know that everyone you know has suffered and survived, but not without questions?

For Townshend, abstract suffering made his art sting—and, as is clear in our conversations and his memoir, he always wanted to make art with a capital “a.” This desire is equal parts plaintive and pathetic in his memoir. Older, consecrated artists like Leonard Bernstein grip him by the shoulders to tell him that his rock opera, “Tommy,” is momentous, a new form of art injecting blood into a tired medium. He nods appreciatively, and doesn’t believe them.

In the years since our first encounter in London, I have met Townshend on several occasions in New York and Tokyo. Each time, we have talked about war—what it means to him, and to me, twenty-plus years his junior. When I published my first book, “Japanamerica,” about the odd synchronicity between two societies, Japanese and American, at once at great odds and suddenly allies, my publisher asked me to send the book to Townshend. He had asked for it, why not give it to him? I was apprehensive. What if he didn’t like it, or worse, ignored it?

Instead he wrote the following: ”Japan’s holocaust was equally traumatic to the ones experienced by many Americans, and perhaps more sudden, more extreme and more focused. This story shows how today we all use movies, comics, music, art and advertising to face our past and its traumas, rather than to escape.” Now that I have read his memoir, I think what Townshend understood was my attempt to draw a parallel between what British musicians of his generation—beaten down by war, nuclear disaster, and identity crises—shared with Japanese artists, whose backgrounds and fierce artistry were shaped by the horrors of apocalypse, the bomb that can end everything as we know it. In contrast to all that was American whimsicality in the face of disaster. Japanese manga and anime artists created new visions out of the rubble of humiliation. They couldn’t fight, per se, but they could rattle the door and re-invent themselves, bursting through, tears and all.